Lissa sat scrunched above the vent grating, watching occasional heads go past. Since the early workers’ shift had started, this corridor in the mechanics’ wing had emptied, but she still hadn’t moved.

Now! she commanded herself.

She leaned forward, zipping and unzipping the front of the stolen technician’s oversuit.

You’re ridiculous. Just go!

“If they catch me, they’ll kill me,” she murmured.

Fine. Don’t do it. Starve.

She felt the hunger threatening to gnaw its way out of her belly. “It’s just that I’ve never done this without Skip.”

“Shut up!” she told herself viciously. She stared down mournfully through the grating. “Maybe I can hold out. The others have been sharing rations with me…”

A familiar irritation rose at the thought.

Angrily she lifted the grating and poked her head down. The corridor was empty. Heart thundering, she gripped the edges and lowered herself down onto a storage cabinet, then dropped to the floor.

“Calm,” she muttered.

She felt dizzy in the open corridor and had to fight the urge to press her body up against the wall, greasy-looking as it was. But in a few turns she was at the supply depot, exactly as she had remembered.

Unexpectedly, a human security was standing just inside the door. Lissa pulled back and took a deep breath. “You can do this,” she whispered.

Stop talking out loud, idiot, she warned herself. She moved into line behind two other people in technicians’ yellow, who were waiting to punch their requests into the screen.

Someone moved behind her. Rot. She turned carefully, but it was just another tech. His mouth was moving. What are you looking at? she read.

“Sorry,” she squeaked, glancing at the security still lounging against the wall.

She moved up to the screen and punched in a cycle’s worth of rations, collection bags, and O₂ cartridges. Then she shuffled down the line, accepting the packages that the mechanical arms brought forward and piling them on her tray.

Now to check out. She gripped the disrupter that was carefully hidden under her right sleeve. Though she had coded it herself and it had synced well to her bio, she still had two escape plans whirling feverishly in her head, along with a very unlikely third in which she battled the bored security with her heavy metal tray.

“It’ll work,” she encouraged herself.

The tech in front of her half turned.

“Nothing,” she blurted out.

She hoped he wasn’t talking—she couldn’t see his mouth, and her deafness would be a dead giveaway down here.

Fortunately he walked away without another glance, and now Lissa stood in front of the comptroller. The bot was an older model, which was why Skip had chosen this depot the last time they’d raided. She lifted her arm as if preparing to press her hand, palm down, onto the bio scanner. Surreptitiously, she slid her arm forward so that the bot scanned the disruptor on her wrist instead.

She stared at the red light, feeling sweat prickling her brow. It was taking too long. The security was looking over at her.

Lissa gripped the edges of the tray and gritted her teeth, getting ready to swing.

The bot flashed green. Lissa moved quickly into the corridor and took her prizes safely back up into the ducts.

Elated, Lissa scarfed down a rations bar as she crammed her new supplies into her backpack. She was maneuvering the largest ration box into the bag when she stopped, laughing aloud at her success. She’d done it.

“Superior work, Liss,” she congratulated herself. “I think we deserve a second bar.”

Ignoring her inner voice, she took another bar out and ate it, savoring the delightful feeling of fullness in her belly. She licked the wrapper clean, then yawned widely. Time to head up to the safety of the ship’s skin and get some sleep.

She exchanged the stolen technician’s oversuit for her thickly padded exvec and locked on her helmet. Then, hoisting her now overstuffed backpack, she flung herself belly down into the duct and began to crawl, pulling herself forward with her elbows, then pushing forward with her knees. It should have been awkward, but the rhythmic movement, long familiar to her, was weirdly graceful. At the first joint collar, she pulled through without slowing, contorting sideways with practiced ease.

“I wish I could find those two women to repay all the rations they gave me. Or the guy,” she said aloud to herself.

“Maybe I will. I know five columns.”

“I could explore…”

“Three and a half.”  Just the thought had her yawning again.

“It took almost a whole spin to code the disrupter!” she burst out. But she didn’t have time to argue with herself; she needed to hunker up and sleep, and to do that safely, she needed to get all the way up to where a column connected to the ammonia-fueled cold plates that drew the heat out of the ship.

“I’m not slow,” she replied irritably, increasing her speed.

Eventually she came to a T-junction and paused a moment to let her memory guide her. She had to be careful—it got a lot colder near the ship’s skin, and the metal sometimes became brittle.

“Stop it. Why are you doing that?”

She wasn’t going to think about Skip. Focus. Elbow, knee, elbow, knee. Skip had warned her once: “No time for tears. Not if you want to survive.” That was back in the beginning, right after her mother had died.

A sharp pain surged through her forearm. She looked down and saw a tear in her suit darkening with her blood. She’d sliced her arm on a metal lip.

She shrugged off her backpack and dragged it around herself, knocking her head-lamp askew. At least the pain would help keep her awake. She pulled off a glove and rummaged through the pack for her suit tape.

She realized that her bare hand wasn’t freezing; warmth from a column must be seeping down the duct. She was almost there. As quickly as she could, she repaired her suit and moved forward again.

Her heavy gloves felt the texture change at the edge of the grating. She’d arrived. She swung her head around, her low beam revealing huddled piles of bodies. It was a good place to congregate: besides the comfortable temperature, the high heat meant they were invisible to the ship’s scanners.

A woman, sitting up, signed a standard greeting: Trouble?

Lissa thrust a fist straight forward. No trouble.

Talking was impossible over the metallic shrieks of the filter engines, and the noise had left most of them deaf anyway.

Place? Lissa signed.

The woman shook her head. Full, she signed back.

Lissa wondered if she should take off her helmet. If the woman recognized her, she’d make room.

The woman made four waves with her hand and pointed. Another column was close.

Lissa nodded her thanks. She knew where it was.

Wearily she pulled herself into another duct, passed through a joint, and slid down a short chute. I’m going to sleep for ages, she promised herself.

She was shivering now, the heat of the column behind her. She shook her head to keep herself awake, and her beam flashed on a pair of eyes. A woman was folded into a small recess. Lissa’s lamp picked out one—no, two—small children huddled around her. She squinted. Defec children. Her heart sank.

Lissa had been eleven when she’d entered the ducts after the failed uprising, and even that had seemed young. She wondered if these two had been born up here, or if the family had managed to masquerade as Immunes before the disease manifested and they were found out.

She paused, then reached back into her bag and offered the woman her large ration box. As the kids tore into it, the woman pressed both hands to her helmet in gratitude.

Lissa considered staying, but what more could she do? And she badly needed a sleep. She resumed pulling.

“We have to stick together, help each other! Mom always said—”

“She would be proud of me,” Lissa said stubbornly, then jammed her eyes shut against a sudden flood of hot tears.

I’m just overtired, she retorted, pausing at a junction as she tried to remember the way. Her impeccable mental map was failing her in her exhaustion. She looked down at the patch on her padded sleeve and deliberately banged her injured forearm on a metal lip. The bright wave of pain gave her a moment of clarity, and she turned left.

Finally, a welcoming warmth. The other column.

“Superior job, Liss,” she told herself. When she felt the grating below, she swung her beam around to assess the space. Only a couple of people—plenty of room.

But before she crawled forward, she stopped and scanned again, slowly. Something was nagging at her. Among the few bodies, one man was weirdly contorted, staring upward. Then, as her beam flashed, another man pushed himself up, staring fixedly at her. Even through his visor, she could see his overly wide eyes, his forced alertness.

Immediately she switched off her head lamp and started scrambling backward into another duct.

She didn’t respond, just slid backward on her belly, down a rippled chute and over a grating, then down into another narrow duct. She only had to avoid him for a short time—the high that was giving him strength and speed would wear out quickly.

Pulling herself in tightly, she managed to turn around. Without her light, she resorted to sweeping an arm out in front of her, feeling for somewhere to hide—a recess—but she wasn’t sure exactly where she was.

A hand closed over her left ankle. He had her! Frantically she kicked out while trying to wriggle forward. But his grip was like a power vice. She was jerked backward, and she twisted around urgently, trying to reach into her pack for her metal spike. She couldn’t reach it.

He was dragging her, and she was screaming now, her gloved hands scrabbling along the smooth edges of the duct, trying to find something to grab onto.

He was too big to turn himself around—would he be able to go backward all the way up the chute? Or would he stop and try to turn around?

Either way, wouldn’t he have to reposition? Readjust his grip? A desperate idea bloomed. Instead of aiming at his hand, Lissa directed her kicks at the fastener on her own boot. One, two, three… She cocked her foot to keep the loosened boot on and drew her other leg up so that he couldn’t grab it. And just then she felt the floor angle upward. They were there.

He let go, and she kicked back with all her strength, planting her feet into his softness. When he grabbed her foot, she launched forward, leaving him holding her boot, not her. She shot away down the duct, moving as fast as she could propel herself.

Suddenly her left hand felt an edge, and she threw herself in, wriggling through the folds of a crinkled plastic exhaust tube as it sagged under her weight.

“Please hold, please hold,” she begged.

Before she had gone five body lengths, it ended at a filter. She was trapped. She scrunched herself up against the fabric panel, feeling her gasps and her thudding heart, waiting for the huffer to get in or for the flimsy tube to collapse. Excess moisture from her panting breath was building up on her face inside her helmet.

A minute passed, then two. Nothing happened. She began to catch her breath.

“No. He’s double my size. He won’t fit in this tube,” she whispered.

Still she waited, attuned to any movement. She felt nothing. After a while she allowed her limbs to relax. “At least it’s warm,” she muttered.

“No.” She turned slightly and felt warmth coming through the filter. I’m on the other side of the plenum box. I’m back at the column!

She could wait him out. After all, she was a duct rat. Wasn’t most of her life just waiting anyway? Cautiously she twisted further around, unclipped the thermoplastic sheet from her backpack, and pulled it open. Wrapping herself up tightly, she fell almost immediately asleep.

“Leave me alone,” she muttered.

She wanted to stay asleep, but slowly she came to and realized that her whole body was trembling. She couldn’t feel her feet even when she tried to flex them, alarmed at the lack of feeling and the heaviness in her arms and legs. She fumbled for her head-lamp and turned it on, but her face shield was frosted over. Hadn’t she been next to a heat column? Clumsily she removed the thermoplastic sheet, and regretted it immediately when she felt the burning cold.

Rot, she thought, wrapping it again around her shoulders. She was shaking even harder now.

She tried to turn around, but for a moment she couldn’t figure out how to do that, and wasn’t sure if her confusion was from exhaustion or hypothermia. She had no idea how long she’d been asleep. She needed to get somewhere warm—but the huffer…

“No, I—”

“You don’t know that.” Awkwardly she stuffed her sheet into her bag, then pulled it out again so she could find her spike.

Fumbling badly in the cold, she gathered herself together. Then, spike in hand, she started wriggling backward, her body painfully tingling with pins and needles in every limb.

At least there’s still circulation, she thought.

It was difficult going, since the plastic tube was twisted and irregular. She wanted to rest, but the cold spurred her onward, and her socked foot was now burning painfully. She kept going.

Then she felt something solid. She probed with her feet but couldn’t find an opening. Since she couldn’t turn around, she pulled off her glove and reached under her body in order to feel the obstruction. It felt like canvas…clothing?

Lissa’s heart started hammering. She scrunched into a ball and lifted herself up so that her head-lamp shone underneath her. She had run into the back of the huffer! His body completely blocking the tube opening.

“He’s asleep,” she whispered.

His ammonia high had clearly worn off, and he was sleeping deeply, despite the cold. Could she push him away without waking him?

As best she could, she braced her arms against the tube and planted both feet squarely on his back. Slowly she applied force, as smoothly and evenly as she could. After a moment, his body shifted away from the tube’s opening.

Lissa gasped as a deeper cold rushed over her. Piercing pains in her hand and foot made her hurry to pull her glove back on and curl her feet under her. The heat column was definitely off. Gritting her teeth, she climbed backward over the huffer’s stiff body. He was dead, and it dawned on her that he’d accidently saved her by trapping her warmth in the plastic tube.

She dragged herself along, the frigid metal duct burning right through her insulated clothes. “Quickly,” she urged herself.

Another body lay at the edge of the grating. She reached out and shook it, recoiling as she recognized the stiffness of death.

Panicked now, she propelled herself toward the first column, mechanically swinging her knees and arms, though she couldn’t see at all between the frost and her tears.

She slipped through duct after duct, not even feeling the cuts from seams as she pulled herself desperately along. But there was no comforting warmth as she approached the first column.

Her gloved hands gripped the gratings, her mind barely registering that it was empty of people, and that she was wasting precious time searching for heat that wasn’t there. This column too was off.

Knees, elbows, knees, elbows. Condensation from her breath had frozen on her eyebrows, her eyelashes, and inside her nose, despite the helmet. Her instincts told her to move her away from the deadly cold of the ship’s skin, but her pace was slowing, her mind blurring. She had to catch her breath.

She dragged herself forward blindly. She’d lost track of where she was. Suddenly she found herself sliding and tumbling down a long, wide chute. She landed in a heap, a welcome numbness engulfing her limbs.

She stretched out, groaning, but couldn’t find the will to propel herself forward. Distantly she heard her mother singing. “Pierce the dark, O starlight gleam, Lead me, lead me through this dream…”

She had to rest, only for a moment… Her mother’s fingers were stroking through her long black hair. It’s not real, Lissa thought dimly. But the usual conflicting emotions she felt whenever she thought of her mother were missing. She was just glad to be with her.

“Steer me forward through the silence…”

A voice in her head was screaming at her to move. Slowly she pushed herself forward—elbow, knee, elbow, knee—but it was too hard. She collapsed again, no longer feeling the cold that pressed against her.

Move!

Yes, she had to move. Again she lifted herself up, but only managed a few meters this time before collapsing. It was easier to stay still, listening to her mother sing.

“Lead me, lead me through this dream…”

Lissa lay motionless, only moving her lips along with the memory of the song.

Suddenly she was blinded. Too many lights! She tried to open her eyes against the glare. Hands were reaching for her, closing on her arms, dragging her forward.

Feebly she tried to fight them off, but her body wasn’t responding.

The sleeve, the bars on the sleeve. Security!

She lay on the cold duct and gave up.

In my YA sci-fi adventure, THE PLAGUE SHIP, fifteen-year-old Lissa is a duct rat—an asymptomatic carrier of the plague. Ever since her mother was killed in a failed rebellion, she’s been scavenging an existence on a Class C Lifeship, fighting both the Immunes and her own psychological trauma.

When an Earthship attacks, Lissa believes she is saved, only to discover that she is now in even more danger: the Originals cryofreeze carriers like herself for biowarfare. With her impressive coding skills, Lissa manages to evade capture, but she is shocked to discover her father’s identity. And when she discovers that her mother is still alive, she will do anything to find her—even team up with the Commandant’s insufferable son. With the help of his security team, a cryopreserved sun-surfer, and an adorable little alert bot, they hijack an obsolete solarcraft and journey to a forbidden quadrant of the known galaxy. There all the humans must unite to defend against a dangerous alien species.

I am always amazed to learn of new and astounding advancements by NASA that go unknown and unheralded by the world at large. The technology of the solarcraft is based on the Parker Solar Probe, which is moving through our sun’s corona as I write this!

Astronauts (and cosmonauts and vyomanauts and uchu hiko-shi) have said that from space you can’t see borders; there is just one Earth. As my teenage protagonist fights through the crippling anxiety and auditory hallucinations that are a realistic consequence of her stresses and traumas, she—and, I hope, my readers—will begin to see that the ultimate survival of the human species is dependent on all of us working together and overcoming our partisan, sectarian prejudices.